


Spring Tide

by Philosopher_King



Series: The Three-Body Problem [5]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Blow Jobs, Cunnilingus, Depressed Zuko, F/M, First Time Blow Jobs, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Multi, Oral Sex, Past Mai/Zuko (Avatar), Polyamory, Vaginal Fingering, Zuko has self-esteem issues, gratuitous descriptions of food
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-23
Updated: 2020-06-23
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:14:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24867412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Philosopher_King/pseuds/Philosopher_King
Summary: "As it turned out, Katara was the first to have the opportunity for a night alone with Zuko—which she thought was only fair, since it was Aang’s impulsive kiss when he was alone with Zuko that had started all of this."Katara and Zuko have dinner together, discuss their past and future relationship with each other and with Aang, and Zuko gives Katara some practical instruction.
Relationships: Aang/Katara/Zuko (Avatar), Katara/Zuko (Avatar)
Series: The Three-Body Problem [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1652515
Comments: 18
Kudos: 143





	Spring Tide

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is part of a series about the development of Aang, Katara, and Zuko's relationship, and would definitely make the most sense if read after the previous installments of the series, especially the two immediately preceding ("Triangular Geometry" and "Angle of Incidence").

As it turned out, Katara was the first to have the opportunity for a night alone with Zuko—which she thought was only fair, since it was Aang’s impulsive kiss when he was alone with Zuko that had started all of this.

Aang, Zuko, and Katara were meeting with Earth King Kuei in Ba Sing Se to discuss the status of the former Fire Nation colonies, including Yu Dao and the rapidly expanding settlement at Cranefish Town, where the lives and livelihoods of citizens of the Fire Nation and the Earth Kingdom and even the Water Tribes had become inextricably intertwined. The most likely solution was to establish some sort of joint protectorate shared by the Earth Kingdom and the Fire Nation… but Aang had had a mad idea, shared with Zuko via messenger hawk while they were planning the meeting with the Earth King.

What if, instead of sharing sovereignty between two existing Nations, they set aside the territory for a _new_ nation, not belonging to any Nation? What if it were independent and governed by local councils, as Air Nomad communities had been? What if it were established on the principle of harmonious coexistence among people of all Nations—with equal representatives of the Fire Nation, Earth Kingdom, and Water Tribe inhabitants guaranteed to have a voice in governing? (And the new nation’s sole Air Nomad inhabitant would have _some_ voice on the council, though perhaps, since there was only one of him, not quite as much voting power…)

Zuko doubted that King Kuei would be willing to cede the territory, which by right belonged to the Earth Kingdom; it would be difficult enough to persuade him to grant the Fire Nation limited legal authority there. Katara suggested that the Northern Water Tribe might support such a venture, given how many of its citizens had migrated to Cranefish Town in pursuit of prosperity. Chief Arnook had no desire to take part in the governance of lands so far from his own, but he might trust his people’s interests to be better represented under a scheme of self-government by the inhabitants rather than shared possession by two other powers, neither of which had reason to be invested in the welfare of Water Tribespeople. Zuko protested that he would always stand up for the rights of the Water Tribe residents of Cranefish Town—he knew Katara would have his head if he didn’t—but Aang pointed out that Zuko would not always be Fire Lord. They needed an arrangement that would protect all of the people in the territory in the long term, regardless of the particular rulers who happened to be in power in the Earth Kingdom and the Fire Nation.

At the meeting, Aang had cautiously proposed his idea to King Kuei, while Katara promised that the Southern Water Tribe would support it and offered her measured confidence that the Northern Tribe would, too. Zuko—to Aang’s relief and delight—confessed that he believed it to be the best solution, but understood that the decision ultimately rested with Kuei and the Earth Kingdom.

Kuei had looked uncertainly to his counselors and said that he needed time to think it over. He proposed that he might visit Cranefish Town, as he had visited Yu Dao two years before, to see for himself the new kind of community that was emerging there. If it was sufficiently different from the society of the Earth Kingdom (or the Fire Nation), it might be best to allow it independent self-governance, because only its own people would understand their needs and interests.

That response was more promising than any of them had dared to hope for. They celebrated at Iroh’s tea shop that night—three of them by drinking a little too much wine (including one from the northwest that Iroh had found—it was made from _grapes_ , wasn’t that curious?) and whiskey (they made it from barley in the northern Earth Kingdom and aged it in charred oak, giving it a caramel sweetness). Aang, of course, did not join in the imbibing, but he was happy to see his friends happy and relaxed… even if he and Katara worried that Zuko was _only_ capable of relaxing with the assistance of alcohol.

The following day, Aang was taking the Ba Sing Se chapter of the Air Acolytes to the Eastern Air Temple to meet Guru Pathik and to see the small herd of sky bison that had survived the attack by Sozin’s forces. They had gone mostly feral in the century since their keepers had been massacred, so Aang planned to keep his students at a respectful distance, to observe them without attempting to interact. But he had been consulting with experts in zoology and animal husbandry at the University of Ba Sing Se about how they might go about re-domesticating the half-wild herd so that some of his acolytes—and someday, spirits willing, his children—might be able to form bonds with their own sky bison as profound as his with Appa.

Zuko was staying in Ba Sing Se for two more days to visit Iroh, who had often invited him to come enjoy the marvels of the world’s greatest city. So he would be spending the days wandering the city with his uncle, finding hidden-away culinary gems, quiet parks in early bloom, and out-of-the-way museums of strange crafts and historical artifacts. But his evenings were his own, and he and Katara agreed—with Aang’s blessing—that they would spend the first of those two remaining evenings together.

Both the Avatar and the Fire Lord, when they visited Ba Sing Se, were given luxurious guesthouses in the Upper Ring—but this time, thankfully, with no smiling tour guides named Joo Dee. This arrangement accorded them a fair amount of privacy: there were few enough guests distinguished enough to be staying so near the palace that they didn’t have to worry about anyone watching their comings and goings—not to mention that the nobility of the Earth Kingdom were not nearly as given to gossip and scandal as those of the Fire Nation (or, for that matter, the ordinary citizenry of the Southern Water Tribe, who were constantly in each other’s business).

Because they did not have to worry about who could wake up and leave earlier to avoid detection, they agreed to meet at Zuko’s guesthouse rather than Aang and Katara’s. Katara admitted that she would have felt odd about sleeping with Zuko in the bed she had been sharing with Aang—and, somewhat less significantly, about eating meat (which she had every intention of doing) at the table where they had been sharing their vegetarian meals. Dining with Zuko that evening, she discovered that after weeks of eating mostly tofu, vegetables, and rice, thin slices of rare beef in a delicate ginger sauce and fresh prawns lightly fried in honey could be an almost spiritual experience. (She resolved to apologize to Sokka for mocking his frequent odes to meat.)

The chef had paired the meal with a subtly sweet local plum wine that Zuko admitted (grudgingly) was comparable to some perfectly respectable ones from the Fire Nation, even if it did not measure up to the very best. It was drier than Katara usually preferred, but she found, surprisingly, that she quite liked it, especially the way it complemented the rich, flavorful food.

“But it’s _expensive_ to be a wine snob,” Katara complained as Zuko gave her an unsettlingly Toph-like cackle. “You don’t have to worry about that, and neither does Toph, but not all of us are the rulers of wealthy nations or scions of insanely rich merchant families.”

“I wouldn’t have thought the Avatar and his wife would have to worry about money,” Zuko remarked.

Katara was glad she hadn’t been holding her glass at that moment, or she might have dropped it. “ _‘Wife’_?”

“Oops, sorry, I suppose I meant ‘girlfriend.’ Or ‘partner’; ‘girlfriend’ seems a bit inadequate after nearly four years, no? But I just assumed… you are planning to get married, aren’t you? Once Aang reaches the age of majority… though Air Nomads didn’t really have the custom of marriage as we’d understand it, so there wouldn’t exactly be a ‘marriageable age.’ And in the Water Tribes it’s sixteen, right?”

Katara shifted uncomfortably; she hadn’t imagined having _this_ conversation with Zuko before their first night together. But since taking the throne, he had become practical sometimes to the point of ruthlessness—certainly with regard to his own feelings. “In the Northern Water Tribe it’s sixteen—but only for women, in practice; men are always at least eighteen. In the South, traditionally, it’s eighteen, for both men and women… though in the past few decades some had started marrying younger, with their parents’ permission, so they could start having children sooner.”

“Ah.” Zuko picked at an imaginary flaw on the table; he knew who was responsible for the urgent need for population replacement in the Southern Water Tribe, as well as for Aang’s lack of guardians who could fill the role of parents. “So… you’ll wait at least until Aang turns eighteen.”

“Assuming we still want to get married by then…”

Zuko was taken aback. “Why wouldn’t you?”

“Despite public appearances, our relationship isn’t perfect. None of our fights so far have risen to breakup level, but who’s to say about the next one?”

“Oh.” Zuko looked as surprised at this revelation as he might have been to be told that Uncle Iroh had never actually liked tea. Katara marveled, once again, at how Zuko’s moments of ruthless practicality could coexist with moments of near-delusional idealism. The one thing the tendencies had in common was that they were almost always at his own expense.

“But don’t worry,” Katara continued breezily. “I’m sure one of Aang’s fan club members—excuse me, ‘Air Acolytes’—would be delighted—nay, _ecstatic_ to bear the next generation of airbenders.”

“Um,” said Zuko, then took a long sip of wine, which was his usual recourse when conversations became awkward.

“There’s no rush for us to get married, anyway. We’ve agreed that we don’t want to start having children anytime soon. There’s a lot we still want to do before we’re tied down with little ankle weights…”

Zuko chuckled understandingly. The elephant-rhino in the room was that it was (almost) as imperative for him to reproduce as it was for Aang—but for Zuko, marriage was a politically delicate necessity to ensure the legitimacy of his heir, rather than just an optional nicety to burnish his image with other nations. Considering the deeply uncomfortable conversation Zuko had had with Mai’s mother at his birthday festivities not quite three months ago—when she had spoken significantly of the strength of firebending in her children’s ‘bloodlines’—Katara thought it best to avoid the matter.

They were avoiding mentioning the _other_ elephant-rhino in the room until they had finished dinner and could be certain that no servers would wander in at an inopportune moment. Finally the last of the dinner dishes were collected; the server left a bowl of fruit and a plate of little pastries for dessert and Zuko asked him to collect those the next morning. He bowed low and departed.

“Oh, it looks just like mochi,” Zuko remarked, picking up a round dumpling with an outer shell of gooey white dough. He bit it in half, revealing a blob of dark red-brown paste at the center. “Tastes like mochi, too,” he said between bites. “I love the red bean ones.”

Katara picked up another of the soft white semi-spheres and bit into it. It was filled with a black paste with a savory flavor reminiscent of peanuts. “Ooh, black sesame,” Zuko observed. “Nice.”

They picked their way through the platter with the air of explorers, biting or tearing open the little dumplings made of various kinds of dough—dense and sticky, steamed and spongy, flaky and shiny with fat, fried to crispiness—and filled with sweet pastes of nuts, beans, or fruits. When Zuko bit into something that looked especially appealing, Katara dared to take a liberty that she wouldn’t have hesitated to take with Aang: she asked him for the other half. (With Aang, she might have just grabbed it.) Zuko looked a bit startled, but then smiled, gestured toward the other half of the bun she had just torn into, and said, “Trade?”

Katara debated whether to give into the temptation to reach around the corner of the table and feed it to him directly. She thought that might be taking _too_ much liberty… but it occurred to her (with a sharp little flutter in her stomach) that they had plans to take far more significant liberties with each other later in the evening. So she swallowed her nerves and, with a mischievous smile, held out the bun so that the edge of it brushed his lips.

She heard a sharp intake of breath, and Zuko’s smile became noticeably more nervous. His eyes briefly flicked down to the pastry at his lips (possibly just registering its position to avoid embarrassing miscalculation) and then back up to meet hers as he leaned forward to take a bite. Katara grew bold enough to gently push the last bite into his mouth, letting his tongue brush her fingers, and then flick a crumb away from below his lower lip.

In return, Zuko offered the other half of his pastry. It was only one bite’s worth, so he could just lightly place it on her lower lip and withdraw his hand, but the fact that he had bitten rather than torn it in half added a peculiar element of intimacy. The filling turned out to be candied ginger, its spice and heat cutting refreshingly through the richness of the crust.

Zuko cleared his throat, took a sip of wine, cleared his throat again—obviously announcing a momentous change of subject.

“So,” he began. “Have you and Aang talked about what I asked. Whether there’s anything you want to save for each other? At least for now.”

“Yes, we have,” she replied firmly, determined not to be awkward about this. She and Zuko, at least, were adults, even if he sometimes had trouble remembering that. “We’ve decided we want to be each other’s first for, uh, penetrative sex.” In spite of her best intentions, she stumbled over the words and felt herself blushing. _Adults, Katara! We’re all adults here._

Zuko’s eyebrow rose and he blinked a few times. “That was… remarkably clinical.”

“Yes, well. I _have_ been training as a healer. What else did you want me to call it?” She refrained from making sarcastic suggestions.

He looked aside, slightly chagrined. “Right. So I take it that means you still haven’t.”

“No.” There was obviously an implicit _Why not?_ in his statement, even if he was not so indelicate as to ask. “It’s not a matter of preventing conception—I asked Yugoda about that a couple years ago. The head healer in the Northern Water Tribe,” she explained. “I’m quite confident I can avoid accidents. It’s… Aang’s not sure he’s ready.”

“Right,” Zuko said again. They let the implication that Katara _was_ ready hang silently in the air. She was, after all, two years older, and in many ways had had to grow up faster. If she and Sokka had not found Aang in the iceberg, if the war had not ended, she might have expected to be married by now to one of her father’s younger warriors—carrying his child, or hoping she might be, while he was away fighting off the Fire Nation Navy.

“So, just hands and mouths, for now.”

“Mostly just hands, really. Neither of us are entirely sure what to do with our mouths. Other than kissing, I mean.”

Zuko’s eyebrow went up again. “Really? It’s not exactly aeronautical science…”

Katara glared at him. “Who are we supposed to ask for instructions? Neither of us ever had a normal teenage peer group. And I am _not_ talking to Gran-Gran about how to give blowjobs. Or Malina, Tui forfend…”

“Given what I know about Suki, she would have dumped Sokka long ago if he weren’t reasonably competent,” Zuko said slyly.

Katara knew he was just trying to provoke a reaction… and it worked. “I’m sorry, you’re suggesting that Aang should have asked Sokka about how to pleasure _his sister?”_

Zuko shrugged. “Or he could ask Suki.”

“Oh.” That was a point she hadn’t considered. “Well, now we have you to share your wisdom.”

“And… those activities are on the table?” He paused. “Poor choice of expression.”

Katara snorted. “Yes, you’re more than welcome to give us… practical instruction in that arena.”

“Excellent,” said Zuko with a smug little smile. He picked a chunk of pineapple out of the bowl of fruit and bit into it. Was he deliberately letting juice run down his chin before wiping it away? Surely a Fire Nation royal knew how to eat fruit politely. She hadn’t thought Zuko capable of that sort of game—he was far too straightforward, too bluntly honest, which was part of his strange appeal—but he had been with Mai for a couple of years, and apparently they had used that time productively; maybe somewhere along the way she had also taught him how to flirt.

Well, two could play that game. Katara took a tangerine out of the bowl with an air of challenge, peeled it slowly, held a section between her lips momentarily before she bit it in half.

Zuko smirked, then went back to eating fruit without any apparent ulterior intent. “It would probably be most useful to you if I could demonstrate proper technique with Aang watching,” he said around a mouthful of dragonfruit, “but I’m not sure how comfortable any of us would be with that, at this stage.”

Katara imagined it, and felt warmth blooming at once in her belly and her cheeks. “I think I’d be just fine with it, actually.”

Zuko laughed. “That’s right; you liked watching us kiss, didn’t you?” Katara felt herself blushing harder. “Well, we can work our way up to it. I’m not sure how comfortable _I’d_ be with an audience, or how comfortable Aang would be with being that audience.”

“Well. I’ll happily volunteer myself to be the first non-participant audience,” Katara said playfully. “Assuming you and Aang can reconcile yourselves to the idea of being watched.”

“Thank you for your selfless sacrifice,” Zuko said gravely. Was _he_ blushing now? It was harder to tell on the scarred side of his face, which was closest to her, but she thought she could see a hint of color on the pale cheek below the scar.

“Aww, you’re cute when you’re flustered,” said Katara, reaching over to put a hand to Zuko’s unscarred cheek.

“Isn’t that most of the time?” he muttered, looking aside.

“Lucky for you, you’re cute most of the time.”

“That’s quite a change of tune from promising to end my destiny…”

“I’ve gotten to know you since then,” Katara said, looking at him seriously. One hand was still on his cheek, and with the other she brushed back a strand of hair that was still a little too short to stay in its topknot. She would have tucked it behind his ear, but it had been reduced by flame and partially fused to his head by thick scar tissue. She had found that disturbing and frightening, once; then, for a time, she had found it pitiable. Now, with the eyes of a trained healer, she saw the remarkable resilience of the body against forces and experiences that threatened to destroy it. And when she looked at Zuko—at both of her boys—she saw the remarkable resilience of the spirit against the same forces.

The moment brought Katara back to the first time she had dared to touch Zuko’s scar with a healer’s appraising hands. The tentativeness was the same, the sense of the promise of something new… but her trust was complete, now, not fledgling and fragile, and the last thing she felt for him was pity. Aside, perhaps, from Aang, Zuko was the strongest person she had ever known, and what she felt as she slowly leaned in to kiss him was respect, admiration, pride in all they had accomplished together; pride that he wanted her, too.

Zuko laced his fingers through her hair and kissed her back with mounting urgency. Their chairs were too far apart; this was soon going to become awkward. Katara pulled away and stood up, extending a hand to him. After looking disoriented for just a moment, he took it and let her tug him out of his chair. “Come,” she said, and she started leading him toward the bedroom (fortunately, since the layout of his guesthouse was exactly the same as hers, she knew which direction to go). He followed for a few steps, then closed the distance to kiss her again. She kept walking backwards toward her goal, grinning against his lips, while he kept pace.

“Wall,” he said, breaking the kiss momentarily, and steered her away from it and through the bedroom door, which he used her back to push the rest of the way open. They made it to the bed (clothed in shades of green and gold, of course) and when they toppled onto it, Katara found herself on top—a little unexpectedly, but she didn’t mind.

She slipped off the simple gold band that held Zuko’s topknot in place and combed her fingers through his hair to shake it loose, then reached for the sash tying his robe. It was in the Earth Kingdom style, long and dark green with gold trim, like the one he had worn while working in Iroh’s tea shop in Ba Sing Se (he had been trying to go incognito while touring the city with his uncle, at least as much as his distinctive scar allowed): another strange point of resonance with their encounter in the catacombs beneath this very city. He worked on untying her sash at the same time and was already pushing her dress off her shoulders while she was still fumbling with the shoulder ties that fastened his robe.

“Why must your clothing always be so bloody complicated?” she complained. He graciously finished undoing the ties and shucked off the robe himself, but underneath he was still wearing a dun-colored long-sleeved shirt and billowed trousers. “And why must you have so many Koh-damned _layers?_ Oh no, are those _buttons?”_

“Uh… sorry? I guess maybe I should have changed before dinner…” He tried to unbutton his shirt as quickly as possible, but haste only managed to impede his progress.

“Stop rushing, I’ll do it,” said Katara, and took over easing the knotted cords through their loops, parting the sides of the shirt as she went.

She had seen Zuko shirtless before, and not just in the immediate aftermath of his fight with Azula, when she was acting as his healer (in consultation with the palace doctor). In the past few years, they had gone swimming twice with their friends at Ember Island; and when Katara, Aang, and Sokka had gone with Zuko and Azula to find their mother, they had been camping in close quarters much as they had near the end of the war, which occasionally meant catching sight of each other changing clothes. But she had always tried to avoid _looking_ , out of loyalty to Aang and the knowledge that looking would be a source of temptation.

Now she was allowed to _look_ , to appreciate the lean musculature of his chest and abdomen, which he must have maintained with daily training—he refused to let peacetime palace life turn him soft. His shoulders were broader than Aang’s, but still had some of the slenderness and roundness of youth; at twenty he was still a sapling, not yet hardened into a sturdy oak like her father and his warriors.

And now she was allowed to look at the lightning scar that sprawled between chest and stomach with the eyes not of a healer, but of a friend and lover. She put a hand over the jagged star of shiny pink scar tissue in the center, then let her fingers trace the fine lines that spidered out from it, like a branching tree. It wasn’t as dark as the one on Aang’s back, which Katara had spent hours tracing, usually while Aang was already sleeping but sleep evaded her (as it so often had since the raid in which her mother had been killed, and still sometimes did).

For all its intimate familiarity, she still had not learned to find beauty in that scar: it was too closely linked to the fear that he would not wake—first from the terrible too-stillness of death, then from the sleep between life and death in which he had lingered for weeks afterward; the fear that she had failed to save him. When she traced the scar on Aang’s back, she was coming to terms with it as with a defeated enemy, reminding herself that it had not managed to take him from her, that together they had conquered even death.

Zuko’s lightning scar was different. She had only briefly feared for his life; he had been struggling to reach her, groaning with effort as well as pain, even as Azula kept her from going to his side to heal him. This scar did not symbolize helplessness, fear, and failure the way Aang’s did. Instead it was a symbol of the bond they had forged out of danger and desperate determination, and it _was_ beautiful, the way its delicate tendrils reached out from its center like a living thing. It was beautiful because it was a mark he had _chosen_ , unlike the one on his face or on Aang’s back.

“You were willing to give up your life for mine,” she murmured with renewed wonder, her palm pressed against the center of the scar, her fingers splayed to follow its branches. “But you barely knew me—and I had only just stopped hating you, scarcely more than a week before.”

“Oh, I…” Zuko looked down, first at her hand, and then to the side. He was flustered again, and consequently adorable. “I didn’t really think of it that way,” he admitted. “My uncle is right… I never have a plan. I leap before I look. And in this case… I was hoping I’d still be able to redirect some of it. And I think I did! Or I probably _would_ be dead. But the rest… yeah. No plan. Good thing you can heal with waterbending, huh?”

Katara blinked. “That’s a little bit terrifying. I assume you’ve started planning ahead more now that you’re ruling a nation…?”

“Of course!” He sounded a little offended—as if he had a right to be, after what he’d just told her. “It’s different when it’s not just my own safety I’m responsible for. And I have a lot of advisors to ask ‘And then what?’ before I’m irrevocably committed to a course of action…”

That made her terribly sad: _“It’s different when it’s not just my own safety…”_ —as if he needed the lives of others resting on him in order to care about his own. But she had a feeling that if she said anything about it, that conversation could go in one of two directions: either Zuko would become defensive and shut down, or he would grow maudlin and she would end up spending the rest of the evening acting as his spiritual counselor. Either way, she didn’t anticipate the evening eventuating in sex, which was, after all, why she was here (it wasn’t for Zuko’s scintillating dinner conversation). So she chose to let the topic lie.

“Anyway, you risked your life for me without thinking… which means that saving my life was as important to you as capturing the Avatar used to be.” She smirked down at him, and he put a palm over his face and snorted.

Katara bent to kiss the scar in the center of his chest, gently at first, then more insistently, licking and lightly nipping at the smooth thickened skin. Then she started working her way down his stomach and was gratified to hear a sharp intake of breath, to feel the muscles under her lips tense and pull in, and see something pushing at the loose fabric of his trousers.

But she didn’t get very far before Zuko looped an arm around her back and flipped them easily. She gasped with surprise and no small measure of delight—as much as she enjoyed taking command, this evidence of his strength still thrilled her. She remembered how effortlessly he had pushed her out of the way of falling rocks and shielded her with his body when his combustion-bending assassin had attacked the Western Air Temple… and also remembered his uncompromising grip on her wrists, painfully wrenching her shoulders back to keep her from waterbending at his soldiers in Yu Dao. That strength was a sword with two edges.

Now he was the one smirking down at her, kneeling over her with one arm still under her back and the other hand holding her wrist on the pillow beside her head—firmly, but not painfully. He moved his arm to grip her other wrist and his leg to straddle her, pinning her thighs between his knees. “Nuh-uh,” he said. “You first.”

“Me first what?” she challenged him.

“What do you think?” He leaned down to kiss her again, deeply and forcefully. Aang never kissed with such ferocity: even at his most ardent, he was always careful, always gentle. That was the difference between kissing an airbender and a firebender, she supposed—or maybe just the difference between kissing a pacifist monk and the ruler of a warrior nation.

Zuko left her panting when he pulled his lips away from hers and released her wrists to keep undressing her. Her dress had ended up on the floor somewhere, and while he still had his trousers on (no fair!), she was down to the sarashi wrapped around her chest and hips. Zuko started unwrapping her chest swiftly but methodically, with the intent eagerness of a child opening a birthday present.

Katara had seldom felt self-conscious about her body with Aang, who had never had another girlfriend and quite possibly had never seen another woman naked. But Zuko definitely had, and Katara had the uncomfortable feeling that he would always be making implicit comparisons, even if he didn’t mean to. Mai’s breasts were small, her chest almost as flat as a boy’s. Did Zuko prefer that (did he prefer Aang)? Would he find her breasts inelegant, vulgar?

At the moment he seemed to have no complaints. He had finished unwrapping her chest and the sarashi had ended up in a ball on the floor with the rest of their discarded clothing. Now he moved down so that his knees were framing her calves and bent to take one nipple in his mouth, licking and sucking it to stiffness, then more of her breast, as much as would fit between his lips. She sighed with pleasure at the gentle pressure and heat of his mouth, the light graze of his teeth on sensitive skin. Then he moved to do the same with the other breast, and it felt so good that she gripped his hair to keep him there a little longer… and heard _him_ whimper.

She loosened her hold so that he could raise his head and he grinned up at her. “Do you like it when I… pull your hair?” she asked a little incredulously.

“Oh, heavens, yes,” he almost purred. “The harder, the better.”

“Oh! I didn’t know that was… a thing people did.”

“No, I suppose you wouldn’t. It would never occur to Aang to try it… and he doesn’t have hair to pull.”

“I’m not sure I’d like it. It would probably remind me too much of fighting with Sokka as a kid.”

“Ah. That’s not a problem for me. Azula skipped right past pulling my hair to burning it off.”

Katara blinked. “I can’t tell if you’re joking or not.”

“If it’s about Azula, you can usually assume that I’m not joking.”

“Wow. Okay, then.”

Zuko moved on to the sarashi around her hips. He didn’t _have_ to remove anything to reach his (presumed) target; he only had to lift the skirt flap that was secured below her waist. Nonetheless, he unwrapped the fabric around her waist and thighs with the same methodical efficiency with which he had bared her chest. And then she was completely naked, bared to his hawk-like golden eyes and trembling like a rabbit-mouse pinned by the gaze of a predator in the open between places of cover.

He must have seen her nervousness or felt her slight trembling, because he asked gently, “Is this okay? Are _you_ okay?”

Why _had_ she been thinking of him as a predator? Because of the color of his eyes—golden, like those of a big cat or a bird of prey? The distinctive color of Fire Nation eyes, which to her had always been the eyes of merciless killers? Because she had first come to know _him_ as a hunter, and she and those she loved had been his prey?

But he was no longer the hunter, was he? For the most part, he had been letting her chase him all evening; in all of this, starting with the first kiss that Aang had initiated, he had been the pursued, not the pursuer. Now she learned that he enjoyed having his hair pulled… and she recalled his fond reminiscence of letting Mai pin him down with knives in his clothing and then take what she wanted. True, he was taking some control here because he was the more knowledgeable party, but he wasn’t wholly comfortable in that role. He didn’t want to be the predator; he wanted another to chase him down, corner him, and leave him at their mercy.

Was it wrong that Katara found herself excited by that prospect? Perhaps she wasn’t there yet, but soon enough she would be. True, she couldn’t throw knives with Mai’s surgical precision… but she had other ways of immobilizing a body. (The thought of putting bending to such a use sent a perverse thrill through her. Would Zuko even let her do it? A question for another time.)

“Yes, I’m fine,” she said breathlessly, returning to the moment. “More than fine.”

“Good,” he said, and slid to his belly between her bent legs.

First he passed the flat of his tongue slowly up along her folds. She gasped, her whole body warm and tingling. But that was only lead-up; he soon focused his attentions on his real target, licking gently, again with the flat of his tongue, over her clit. This time she not only gasped but convulsed. Of course she had been touched there, by her own hands or Aang’s. She had also experimented with a (different) unorthodox use of waterbending while bathing, and sometimes found the gentle, fluid pressure more gratifying than fingers. Zuko’s tongue combined the advantages of both—and surpassed the dexterity and fine control of fingers, she discovered when he started licking faster, moving the flat of his tongue in circles, then the blade of it in rapid strokes. The pleasure was hotter and more piercing than anything she had ever felt, until it crossed an invisible line into a throbbing ache.

“Too much!” she gasped out, putting a hand to his chest to push him away and clamping her legs together, still feeling the reverberations of his touch through her whole body, coiled hot in her belly, pulsing in her thighs, sparking up along her spine from its very base.

“Sorry,” he said quickly, looking excessively guilty.

“Not your fault,” she said, still breathing hard. She shuddered a little as the too-intense sensations at her core seemed to disperse and dissipate through her limbs. “Just… slow down a bit?”

“Of course.”

After a pause and a few more tiny adjusting shudders, she parted her legs again to let him back in. He started again at her labia and devoted more attention there this time, letting her acclimate to the motion of his tongue over sensitive flesh before he moved back to the most sensitive. He let his tongue dip into her slit, passing it over her inner walls, and this was something she had felt before too—she had had both her own fingers and Aang’s inside her—but this was different again, more delicate perhaps, and felt more intimate, even forbidden… and was that because it was Zuko’s mouth rather than his hands, a more intimate part of himself, or because it was _Zuko’s_ mouth, and even though Aang knew and approved it, part of her mind (and, apparently, her body) still thought of this as a transgression, thought of _him_ as the forbidden desire that lived only in guilty fantasies and dreams?

Zuko looked up and met her eyes before he moved his tongue back to her clit, and she nodded. He kept the strokes of his tongue slower and lighter than before, letting her adjust to the building sensation before it overwhelmed her… but now he was going _too_ slowly, keeping her perched on the slope of a growing wave that yearned to crest and break. “More,” she breathed, and extended her fingers to thread into his hair. When she tugged lightly, he made a noise in his throat that was somewhere between a growl and a purr, and his deft tongue hurried to oblige her request.

“Oh, storms and spirits…” Her breathing grew harsher as the wave of sensation built and she pulled harder on Zuko’s hair, keeping her fingers braced against his scalp so that she wouldn’t pull his head _away_ from her—which was the last thing she wanted. His tongue kept up its inexorable pressure, and then he added to it his fingers inside her—he didn’t stop to wet them in his mouth the way Aang usually needed to, but it wasn’t necessary, because with the magic his mouth had been working, her body was doing quite enough on its own to ease his way. His fingers were curled upward, looking for something… and she knew when he had found it, because the pressure of his fingertips merged with the movements of his tongue to buoy her to the peak of the wave, where she floated for half a second, ready to swear she could see miles over an imaginary horizon as if riding one of her panes of ice on the ocean, before she slid over the top and it crashed over her, pummeling her with wave after wave of something that she hesitated to call _pleasure_ because it was too one-dimensional for this intersection of all the feelings her body was capable of.

Zuko must have felt when her body tensed, holding its balance at the knife-edge moment of climax, and then shuddered into release, because his tongue and fingers stilled and he held a gentle pressure while she let each successive wave carry her gradually to steady land.

 _“Fuck,”_ she said, sincerely and emphatically. She untangled her fingers from Zuko’s hair and he took that as his cue to pull away. He sat up, his knees bent under him, and used the back of his hand and forearm to wipe saliva, and probably not only saliva, away from his mouth and chin. Now she could definitely see something straining at his trousers, and she was pleased to know that being the cause of _her_ pleasure was enough to put him in such a state.

“Good?” he asked with a mischievous grin, breathing almost as hard as she was.

“Tui and La, Zuko…” she said before she remembered that Tui was now at least partly constituted by Yue, and swearing by her brother’s ex-girlfriend after having the most intense orgasm of her life was perhaps inappropriate. “That was… like nothing I’ve ever felt.”

“Well,” he said, looking very pleased with himself. “Now you have a better idea of the possibilities… and I expect you’ll be able to describe to Aang what I did?”

Katara frowned. “You don’t have to keep making it about me and Aang,” she said… maybe a little too sharply, because he shrank back from the reproof. In a softer tone, she continued, “We’re not doing this just so you can be our… sex coach, or whatever you think you are here. That’s not why _I’m_ here. I want _you_ , Zuko.” He looked away, his face reddening under her purposeful gaze. “Yes, you, Fire Lord, former Fire Nation defector, retired Avatar hunter, and perpetually flustered teenage boy.”

“I’m not a teenager anymore,” he reminded her with an irritable twist of his mouth.

“Oh, of course. You’ve grown wise and self-assured now that you’ve reached the ripe old age of twenty.”

“Shut up,” he grumbled.

“Gladly,” she said. She grabbed his hand and tugged him down beside her, then climbed on top of him to kiss him. She could taste herself on his tongue—like the sea, she thought, which seemed appropriate.

Now he let her hungrily kiss her way down his body, along the sharp line of his jaw, the long slope of his neck, the hard lean muscles of chest and stomach, pausing again to pay her respects to the lightning scar before she made her way along the slender trail of fine dark hairs that disappeared under the waistband of his trousers. She spread her hand over the lightly trembling plane of his abdomen—no longer concave, as it had been in the summer of the comet, and his ribs were no longer countable through the skin, but he still seemed too thin, especially when his gasps pulled his stomach in as if trying to escape the determined press of her lips, her playful licks and nips at sun-starved skin.

“Have they been feeding you enough, Your Fire Lordship?” she asked him teasingly.

He stared at her. “Really? You want to talk about my diet right now?”

“Not really. I just want to scold you for not eating enough and remind you to keep yourself properly nourished.”

“Noted. Is that all, Healer Katara?”

She snorted. “All on that topic, yes. Now, where was I?” Oh yes, his waistband. She pulled it down over his hips, and he helped her out by lifting them and bending his legs so that his trousers could be pulled off more easily. That left only a pair of fine-woven linen shorts—a pale brick-red, indicating their origin in the Fire Nation, in contrast to the green, gold, and tan of his outerwear, the bedclothes, and the décor of the entire house (indeed, the entire kingdom). The sudden incongruity made her giggle—she couldn’t help it.

“What?” he asked self-consciously. He must have thought it was something about the body part that was very conspicuously outlined by the thin fabric.

“Your underwear doesn’t match,” she said, her lips still pulling involuntarily into a smile that threatened to break into laughter again.

He looked down, and the corners of his lips started twitching upward, too. “Ah, yes. The telltale sign of my true allegiance. Not a good thing to be caught with if I were going undercover as a spy.”

Katara laughed out loud, then kissed the skin of his belly right above the top of his shorts and swiped her tongue under the edge of the fabric, teasing. His cock twitched in response, pushing even more visibly at the constraining garment. Katara pulled the shorts carefully down over his hips and bent legs, focusing on the practical task, trying not to look at what it revealed until she had discarded the last item of clothing between them.

When she allowed herself to look, she found herself making the same sort of implicit comparison she had feared _he_ was making between her and Mai (and wondered if she should take that as corroboration for her fears, or as evidence that she was unfairly projecting her own tendencies onto him). Zuko’s cock was a little longer and considerably thicker than Aang’s, and Katara wondered whether that was simply a consequence of the nearly four-year age difference between them or whether it was a more permanent difference. She knew that Aang was still growing in height—Sokka had continued growing well past sixteen, to her profound annoyance—but she wasn’t sure when this part of the body stopped growing (and no way in all hells was she going to ask Sokka).

Katara looked up at Zuko (his face, that is) for guidance and found him blushing once more, which prompted in her another swell of fondness.

“Flustered again, Your Fieriness?” she said, letting the warmth in her voice and her smile assure him that the teasing was meant kindly.

“You were… staring,” he said, a little defensively, blushing even darker.

“I was… waiting for instruction,” she said, and now she could feel herself blushing, too.

“Of course you were.” He coughed. “Right. Uh… don’t think you have to put the whole thing in your mouth.”

“Oh, good. That doesn’t look physically possible…” With him or Aang, for that matter.

“The most important thing is what you’re doing with, uh, with the end part.” He sat forward to show her with his own hand, and she noticed that his body’s enthusiasm had waned a little while they were discussing the matter.

“Yes, I have learned which bits are the most sensitive…”

“Right. Of course.” His gaze shifted to the side, and Katara felt guilty for reminding him of her long-established relationship with Aang, even after she had told him that he wasn’t merely a means to enhance that relationship.

“So… what should I be doing with the, ah, end part?” she prompted him, gently taking his cock into her own hand, which made it jump again. She heard his breath catch.

“Use your tongue. It’s not unlike what I did with you, though of course there’s more, um, surface area. So it’s less fine tongue movements and more like… uh… you know those balls of fruit-flavored finely shaved ice they sell in the paper cones on Ember Island?”

“Ooh, yes.”

“Pretend you’re licking one of those. You want your tongue to go all the way around, and sometimes you’ll put your mouth down over it and, um, suck a little…” Oh, he looked more flustered than ever, and she could feel him softening in her hand (not unlike the fruit ice…).

“And hold the base like it’s the paper cone?” she guessed, demonstrating (which helped some with the softening).

He nodded. “And you can, uh, move your hand there, too. Preferably with a layer of spit…”

“ _That_ part I knew.”

“Right,” he said again apologetically. It was starting to sound like a tic.

“Have you done it yourself before, or just… received?” she wanted to know.

“No, I’ve never done it,” he admitted. “I’ve never been with anyone but— but Mai.”

“But you’ve wanted to, with other boys?”

He shrugged and looked away again. “Not seriously, with anyone in particular. Just… fleeting thoughts that I knew I had to quash immediately.”

“Until recently,” she said with a knowing smile—reminding him that Aang was his, too, now. “So you’ll have some learning of your own to do, putting your knowledge into practice.”

“I guess so,” said Zuko, allowing himself a slow half-smile.

“And now we get to test your effectiveness as a teacher,” Katara said, and bent to swirl her tongue around the head of his cock—though she had to say, it tasted a little saltier than an Ember Island fruit ice cone.

Zuko gave a short gasp and leaned back onto his elbows. She repeated the motion, spending a little extra time at the spot at the underside of the head that always made Aang groan and squirm, and Zuko closed his eyes, letting out a slow, heavy breath. So far, so good. She tried enclosing the head and a little more in her mouth, careful to shield her teeth (which she would also do with an ice cone, come to think of it), and imagined slurping some of the shaved ice into her mouth. The noise it made was not the most attractive, she had to admit, but the technique seemed to be effective, judging by the way Zuko flopped back onto the pillows with a groan and threw his arm over his face (dramatic as always).

So much for the mouth movements; now to combine it with the hands—like learning to sing a song and clap a rhythm or play a hand drum at the same time. Katara spat into her palm and wrapped it around the base of Zuko’s cock. She swiped her hand all the way up and over the tip, and he grunted and thrust his hips upward slightly into her touch, perhaps involuntarily. He stopped himself from doing it again once she brought her mouth back to him, apparently by force of will, because she could feel his hips tensing and twitching slightly with the urge to push into the source of warm friction. Instead he dug his fingers into the bedsheets, twisting them in his white-knuckled fists, and made quiet whimpering sounds in his throat that he refused to release into full-fledged moans. (Aang never held his sounds in—was that only because he had never been taught that that was what a man should do?)

Zuko’s restraint faltered again when Katara grew daring enough to circle her tongue over the sensitive spot just below the head of his cock while he was still enveloped in her mouth. He let out a sharp exhalation that turned into a soft cry and his hips convulsed, fortunately nudging the roof of her mouth rather than the back of her throat.

Surprised, Katara pulled away. “I’m so sorry,” Zuko stammered out, mortified. He quickly sat up straight against the headboard—so that he could see her, yes, but also distancing himself from her. “I’m usually better about that… I guess it’s been a while. I’m sorry,” he repeated. “Are you all right?”

“Yes, I’m fine,” Katara said with a little laugh. “Although… my neck and shoulders are getting pretty stiff and sore from propping myself up on my elbows like this. So’s my whole back, actually. Is there a more comfortable way to do this?”

Zuko blinked. “Um… I don’t know if you’d be more comfortable kneeling with me sitting on the side of the bed?”

Katara looked down at the wooden floor covered by woven straw mats. “Pass me one of those pillows, would you?”

They paused to rearrange themselves. Katara put the pillow on the floor beside the bed and sat on it with her legs folded under her. Zuko moved to sit perched at the edge of the mattress, his knees on either side of her body. He looked awkward and embarrassed, his face flushed as he avoided looking at her, and his erection had flagged again during the interruption.

“Hey,” she said, patting his knee comfortingly. “It’s fine. Shit happens. I wasn’t expecting that everything would go completely smoothly, even if you are a wise old man of twenty.”

That made him roll his eyes and snort in his throat. “Yeah, I know. There’s always awkwardness. It’s just…” He paused, took in a breath, held it, let it out again in a rush, and shook his head. “You know, now is really not the time to explain. Maybe later.”

Katara strongly suspected it had something to do with Mai. And as fond as she was of Zuko, as willing as she was to respect his emotional needs and forgive his moments of weakness, she really didn’t want a repeat of the last time they had been together, when he ended up bursting into tears while she was trying to get him off, and then he cried on her shoulder about Mai and none of them (Zuko, Katara, or Aang) succeeded in getting off.

“All right, then,” Katara said, businesslike, and returned to the matter at hand. This arrangement was easier on her back and neck, though she sometimes had to lean forward or raise herself a little on her thighs to get the right angle. Now that she wasn’t resting her weight on one forearm, she had two free hands, so she used the one that wasn’t gripping the base of Zuko’s cock to gently cup his balls, letting her fingers toy with them a little, enjoying the feel of the cool velvety skin as she always did with Aang. Zuko gasped and groaned, clutching fistfuls of the bedding.

“I’m getting close,” Zuko said, his voice harsh and breathless.

Katara pulled her mouth away. “Oh. What should I do, then?”

“Just use your hands. You don’t have to let me—ah!—finish in your mouth.”

Katara already knew how to use her hands to reduce Aang to a boneless, whimpering mess, so she was back on familiar ground here. Zuko’s arms were trembling as he struggled to hold himself sitting upright. “Lie down,” Katara ordered him.

“What?”

“It’ll be easier if you’re lying down. At the head of the bed.” She removed her hands and climbed back onto the bed herself, to lie on her side behind him. Zuko shakily hauled his legs back up and turned to lie down facing her.

“Good,” she said, and took him in her hand again. Panting, he hooked his leg over hers and an arm around her back to pull their bodies closer. He leaned forward to kiss her again, but she put a hand on his chest to stop him. “Nope,” she said. “I want to see your face.”

“Katara…” he protested.

“It’s only fair. You saw whatever weird face I was making…”

“Mmph,” was the only reply he managed to make. After a few more erratic thrusts into her hand, his whole body went still, all his muscles taut, and then with a quiet “Ah!” he shuddered, his fingers tightening almost painfully around her arm, and she felt pulses of wetness on her hand and against her belly.

As promised (threatened?), Katara watched his face as he came. His eyes were squeezed shut, his mouth open not in the stereotypical ‘O’ but in what looked almost like a grimace of pain. Aang never looked like that; his face when he came was always open, blissful, almost beatific. She wondered whether there was any meaning to be found in the difference or if it was just a matter of random idiosyncrasy.

“Phew,” Zuko said breathlessly when all the shudders had made their way through his body.

“How did I do on my practical exam, Sifu Zuko?” Katara asked him with a sly smile.

“Pffft.” He shook his head. “You are a remarkably fast learner as always, Master Katara.”

“Thank you, Sifu,” she said, putting one hand over the other fist and bowing her head.

Zuko snorted. “I need to get myself cleaned up,” he said, and got up to go into the washroom adjoining the bedroom. He returned after a couple minutes, the hair around his face slightly damp, and Katara went to wash up as well—her hands and stomach first, then her face and teeth in preparation for sleep.

She returned to the bed and found that Zuko had claimed the righthand side. She wondered if that was a habit for him—perhaps so that the unscarred side of his face would be the one resting against the pillow. But he was currently facing toward the center of the bed rather than the edge, which suggested that he expected to talk before they slept. Katara climbed into the other side of the bed facing him.

“How are you feeling?” she asked him once she had settled in.

“I was about to ask you the same thing.”

“Well, I asked first.”

Zuko rolled his eyes. “I feel fine. More than fine,” he added, echoing her words earlier.

“You don’t feel… weird about any of this?”

“What, because you’re practically a married woman?” he ribbed her.

“Well… kind of,” she said, taking his remark seriously. “Because Aang and I have been together so long. But I don’t want you to feel like an intruder, or a”—what was the expression he had used?—“a fifth wheel. Or our sex instructor,” she added with a slight laugh.

“I don’t—or not only that,” he said (presumably meaning the ‘sex instructor’ part). “Still… you spend most of the time together, and I only see you every few months, at best. I feel like I have a lot of catching up to do.”

“We’ll get better about coming to see you,” Katara promised.

“Assuming there’s not another spirit crisis for Aang to deal with…”

“They don’t happen _that_ often. And the political crises usually involve you, too, so—good excuse to visit!”

“Wonderful,” Zuko drawled. “But I can’t help thinking… eventually you’ll get married and have children. And I’ll need to marry a Fire Nation noblewoman and produce an heir. I’ll always be at the edge of your lives. A comet with a very long orbit. The point between the longest sides of a severely lopsided triangle.” He traced a shape on her shoulder the way Aang had on her hand to illustrate types of triangles (whose names she no longer remembered): an uneven, elongated triangle like the shadow of a sundial at evening. “And who’s to say that my wife—whoever she is—will be willing to accept this arrangement?”

“You could just keep it secret,” Katara pointed out.

Zuko looked horrified. “From my wife?”

“Is that a moral or a practical objection I’m hearing?” Katara asked dryly—that it would be an appalling betrayal to keep such a secret from a spouse, or that he was bound to slip up sooner or later?

“…both?”

“But are any of these reasons not to have us whenever you can, for as long as you can?”

“No, I suppose they aren’t.”

Katara cupped a hand around the back of his neck, under the smooth silky curtain of his hair, and pulled him forward to kiss him, lightly, gently.

Abruptly she remembered something. “You wanted to say something earlier, about why the awkwardness bothered you…?” She braced herself for more tears about Mai. At least now they were both mellowed out by orgasm; maybe he would be less overwrought about the situation.

“Oh. Just that it’s been so long since… well, anything. More than two years since I was last with someone else—not counting… you know.” Their last abortive attempt, at the solstice three months ago. “Almost four years since my _first_ time getting to know a new partner. I feel like I’m new at this all over again.”

“Good, then.” Katara smiled. “We can all be new at this together.”

**Author's Note:**

> I had to look up types of tides to come up with a title that fit with my cute little planetary/astronomical theme. Spring tide is when there's the biggest difference between high and low tide, at the full and new moons, when the Sun, Moon, and Earth are in alignment (or "syzygy") and the Sun's gravitational pull amplifies the Moon's. It doesn't actually have to do with the season, but this does take place in spring, so I'm being punny.
> 
> On the thing about the cones of shaved ice or sorbet (which I assume is what Zuko got for Mai in "The Beach," which then fell off the cone onto her): the first thing I ever learned about giving blowjobs was from watching the HBO miniseries of _Angels in America_ , in which a character is listening to the radio and hears Dr. Ruth saying that one should treat the penis like an ice cream cone.


End file.
